3 ms·

It's not just about whether appliances need to be fixed, it's also about whether they are serviceable at all. Due to miniaturization and perhaps planned obsoles

It's not just about whether appliances need to be fixed, it's also about whether they are serviceable at all. Due to miniaturization and perhaps planned obsolescence, increasingly appliances cannot be fixed at all.

hershel 12y ago
In many white goods, miniaturization to the level that prevents repairs are not necessary.
analog31 12y ago
I think there's some truth to this. It's not just miniaturization, but sometimes components are now so tightly integrated and specialized that failure of one part causes a lot of collateral damage. At least for "major" appliances, I tend to choose based on my best guess of serviceability. I avoid models that have too much electronics, not because I expect those parts to break, but because the complexity might frustrate diagnosis in the future. There's a lot of repair information online. People enjoy blogging about their successful repairs. But judging from comments on web forums, I'm guessing that a lot of people doing these repairs are landlords. If you buy 15 dryers, and they all break on the same day for the same reason, you'll have a pretty strong incentive to figure out how to fix them. There's some debate of this exact issue among musicians who play amplified instruments, as I do. There are now tiny little amplifiers, but if you open them up, it's apparent that diagnosis of the circuits (switch mode power supplies and amplifiers) would be daunting, even for a pretty serious electronics enthusiast. There are players who will avoid these products for this reason. I've decided in that case that I will take the risk of having to replace a module or an entire unit in the future, because the portability is actually a benefit.
- userbinator 12y ago
  > There's a lot of repair information online. Indeed there is, and one of the sad things is that this proliferation of easy access to information has seemingly not had much effect on the throwaway consumerism of today's culture, nor in getting people to understand more about the machines they use. A service manual is often literally a Google away (even for older models, there are a lot of neighbourly people who digitise them), and although I've not needed to do any major repairs on my white goods, I've collected from the Internet all the information I need to for most if not all of them.
sitkack 12y ago
The other is parts inventory and availability. I was renting a house about 14 years ago and the washer from the early 60s finally broke, not the motor the belts or the pump but one of the timing gears in the clock like sequencer that ran the cycles. The landlord simply disposed of the old unit and replaced it with a new way less well built one. I called tons of GE parts suppliers and they could not procure a sequencer. Now I would just 3d print the one gear that had worn out. :(
- derekp7 12y ago
  Another option to 3d printing (I wonder how well this works for gears on consumer-level printers?), is to print out the gear pattern on label paper, and stick that onto a piece of plexi glass. Then cut out the circular shape, and finally use a triangle file (along with a vice) to cut the gear notches, using the printed label as a guide. I did this once for a gear for an older Okidata dot-matrix printer used for multi-part forms.
  - sitkack 12y ago
    That would have worked but I didn't think of it in 2000. That washer could have run another 20 years. kintsugi

hershel 12y ago

In many white goods, miniaturization to the level that prevents repairs are not necessary.

analog31 12y ago

I think there's some truth to this. It's not just miniaturization, but sometimes components are now so tightly integrated and specialized that failure of one part causes a lot of collateral damage. At least for "major" appliances, I tend to choose based on my best guess of serviceability. I avoid models that have too much electronics, not because I expect those parts to break, but because the complexity might frustrate diagnosis in the future. There's a lot of repair information online. People enjoy blogging about their successful repairs. But judging from comments on web forums, I'm guessing that a lot of people doing these repairs are landlords. If you buy 15 dryers, and they all break on the same day for the same reason, you'll have a pretty strong incentive to figure out how to fix them. There's some debate of this exact issue among musicians who play amplified instruments, as I do. There are now tiny little amplifiers, but if you open them up, it's apparent that diagnosis of the circuits (switch mode power supplies and amplifiers) would be daunting, even for a pretty serious electronics enthusiast. There are players who will avoid these products for this reason. I've decided in that case that I will take the risk of having to replace a module or an entire unit in the future, because the portability is actually a benefit.

userbinator 12y ago
> There's a lot of repair information online. Indeed there is, and one of the sad things is that this proliferation of easy access to information has seemingly not had much effect on the throwaway consumerism of today's culture, nor in getting people to understand more about the machines they use. A service manual is often literally a Google away (even for older models, there are a lot of neighbourly people who digitise them), and although I've not needed to do any major repairs on my white goods, I've collected from the Internet all the information I need to for most if not all of them.

sitkack 12y ago

The other is parts inventory and availability. I was renting a house about 14 years ago and the washer from the early 60s finally broke, not the motor the belts or the pump but one of the timing gears in the clock like sequencer that ran the cycles. The landlord simply disposed of the old unit and replaced it with a new way less well built one. I called tons of GE parts suppliers and they could not procure a sequencer. Now I would just 3d print the one gear that had worn out. :(

derekp7 12y ago
Another option to 3d printing (I wonder how well this works for gears on consumer-level printers?), is to print out the gear pattern on label paper, and stick that onto a piece of plexi glass. Then cut out the circular shape, and finally use a triangle file (along with a vice) to cut the gear notches, using the printed label as a guide. I did this once for a gear for an older Okidata dot-matrix printer used for multi-part forms.
- sitkack 12y ago
  That would have worked but I didn't think of it in 2000. That washer could have run another 20 years. kintsugi